onocoy: The Venture Leader Mobile enabling mass adoption of high precision positioning with blockchain technology

05.02.2024 09:00, Rita Longobardi

Meet Daniel Ammann, President of onocoy. The engineering startup creates a three-sided platform between station operators, clients, and data provisioning. Daniel and the other Swiss National Mobile Team members will head to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of February.

Name: Daniel Ammann
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Nationality: Swiss
Graduated from: ETH Zurich, Electrical Engineering, 1995
Job title: President
Number of employees: 15
Money raised: CHF 2.5M




 

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Can you tell us who your product or solution helps, and how?
We enable industrial automation and autonomous B2B applications to precisely locate themselves using High Precision GNSS technology with a decentralized physical infrastructure network (“DePIN”).

What market are you addressing and what is the potential of your startup in that market?
Anything using GNSS/GPS technology that needs high accuracy (centimetre level) and struggles with the existing suppliers’ business models or service offerings.

How and where did you come up with the idea for your startup?
I’ve personally been in the GNSS industry for the last 25 years, building up the Swiss unicorn u-blox AG. The problem in the high precision positioning services industry (focus on high-value niches, no mass-market business models, no dense/broad enough coverage) was recognized by me in 2015. The initial attempts to build an industry-wide consortium lead in a JV failed in 1019. The onocoy solution solves the same problem using a decentralized, blockchain-powered setup.

What do you expect from the Venture Leaders roadshow and how do you think it will help you achieve your vision?
Insights into other teams’ learnings, networking, connections to potential investors and coaches, and public exposure at the MWC.

What are your team’s key achievements to date?
We’ve successfully implemented our MVP and are mostly operational.

Is there a key principle or value that guides you as you build your company?
Yes, we are following the Web3 key principles (decentralization, transparency, non-discriminatory), and also implement these in our internal organizational structures.

What is the most important lesson you have learned as a founder?
That always takes twice as long and costs twice the amount as initially anticipated. And that Marketing & Sales is crucial. More so than the actual product or the service.

What is your favourite productivity hack or tool and why?
Hourly breaks to air the mind.

What was your dream job when you were a child?
I've always dreamed of becoming an electrical engineer and this is what I have become. I already knew at the age of ~13 that I wanted to work with Satellites and Time transfer, due to a childhood experience at Technorama in Winterthur, where I discovered the first DCF77 receiver that was receiving a time code from the national time broadcast and visualized it with a 7-segment LED display.